Sometimes writing down your thoughts and feelings can help you better understand them.

Our volunteers answer approximately 600 emails a day that come through to jo@samaritans.org.

Nearly half of the emails we receive are from people who are having a tough time, but not suicidal.

How long before I get a reply?

We aim to respond to your email within 12 hours. How quickly we respond depends on how many volunteers we have working at that time.

If you email jo@samaritans.org and don’t receive a reply within 24 hours, it may be worth checking your junk mail folder or resending your original message just in case there was a problem with sending it the first time.

But I don’t want anyone to see my email address

Your email is 100% confidential and all details, like your email address, are removed before our volunteers see it. Only trained Samaritans volunteers see and reply to your emails.

No automated messages are used.

Emails are kept on a central server for 30 days so that if you want to email us again, we can see that you have contacted us before.

After 30 days, all emails are automatically deleted from the central server.

How do you hide the email address?

When your email is received by us, the email address is removed and replaced with a unique number. Volunteers only see the unique number and they send the reply to that unique number.

When we send the email back to you, the unique number is then matched back to your email address.

The same unique number will apply to each email address, so if you write to us again from the same email address, this will be matched to previous emails and our replies within the last 30 days.

This helps the volunteer have a record of what you have discussed before and a more thorough understanding of your situation, without ever revealing your email address.